Goblinkin a deckbuilding.., p.13
Goblinkin: A Deckbuilding LitRPG, page 13
“What makes you say that?” Magda asked, picking up the pace so she was closer to Sarkuran.
“Well, those for one.” The demon king nodded towards the end of the street. There a large building had been crushed and pressed together to form a kind of rubble-based nest. Sat amongst the rocks, barely visible in the light of the sunstones, was a cluster of eggs. Huge things easily up to Magda’s waist, their off-white shells caught what little light they could and glistened. They looked like reptile eggs, soft-skinned, flexible and very fragile. The mother couldn’t be far.
“That’s uh, a lot of eggs. What are we going to do about them? We can’t just leave them, right? Otherwise, we’re only delaying the goblins' problem until those hatch. Then they’ll have half a dozen problems.”
“Astute. Though we’ve got something of another issue too. Thankfully this one isn’t a problem though. Look at the base of the eggs, there’s a glow there, correct?” Sarkuran said.
Magda squinted her eyes as she peered closer. Sarkuran was right, there was faint light escaping from beneath the eggs. The colour was immediately familiar, it was the warm blue glow of booster crystals. The pterosaur was using them to incubate its offspring, raw untethered power plucked like leaves.
“That’s a lot of booster crystals. Like, a lot. This is a big find for us.”
“Perhaps,” Sarkuran said. “It still doesn’t solve our problem, does it? We’ll need to defeat the beast and then decide what to do with the eggs. I would suggest disposing of them, but I have to imagine that suggestion is an unpopular one.”
Magda raised an eyebrow though her expression was difficult to see in the darkness. “Uh, yeah. I know we’ve got to fight, and kill, sometimes, but taking out some unborn children is probably not the right way to be going about doing things.”
“I suspected as much.”
“I think we should bring the eggs back to the goblins. Let them choose what they want to do with them. I mean they might want to eat them or something, but at least it’s not us doing it. That feels a little bit better.”
“Agreed,” Sarkuran said. “Though I have to wonder what effect putting them in our packs will have. Perhaps if it works, we could simply stuff Gareth into one of them and not worry about him until we got back to the tower.”
Magda thought about the prospect for a moment. Sarkuran was obviously joking but it was an interesting idea at its core. The biggest problem that Magda could think of was simply getting Gareth inside. The packs only opened a certain amount and that was nowhere near enough to stuff in a whole person. “Maybe if we could get the same enchantments on a sack or something like it? It’s not a terrible idea if there’s another accident like this. Is accident the right word? I guess it is.”
“That’s actually an interesting idea. Someone is bound to have attempted it previously though. Makes you wonder why it’s not common, there must be a reason.”
“Money probably.” It hadn’t taken Magda long on arrival to Acamida to discover just how important money was. Everything had a price and Magda knew she was lucky to have the vast reserves of treasure the tower held at her fingertips. “You know how it is.”
“I certainly do.” Sarkuran took a step forward, crouching low to make his shape as small as possible. The pterosaur didn’t seem to be directly ahead but there was almost zero chance it wouldn’t be somewhere nearby. When Gareth had stumbled on the beast it had to have been hiding to avoid the newcomers, the party’s arrival likely disturbing it mid-hunt. Whilst it wasn’t quite universal most beasts tended to stick close to their offspring in his experience.
“What are you doing?” Magda said, finding the low squat Sarkuran had dropped into ridiculous.
“Trying to be stealthy.”
“Bit late for that isn’t it? I mean we’ve been talking pretty loudly for a while now. I have to imagine the thing would have heard us now. Plus, we’re carrying these.” Magda thrust her sunstone forward to make her point. “We might as well be carrying big signs announcing where we are.”
“A fair point well made,” Sarkuran said. “I will concede to you this time.”
“Oh, that’s rare. I’ll make sure to put that in my diary.”
Any moment of levity between the goddess and demon was broken by a flash of golden light, the familiar flare of a shield being activated. It blinded them both for half a second, the light fading quickly enough to reveal what had happened.
Hanging to the wall just to the right of Magda was the pterosaur, its skin rippling as its colour changed. It had been hiding against the stone, the darkness helping its camouflage. The beast had waited until the two duellists had closed the gap before striking. It had learnt its lesson about engaging in a direct fight, the wound from Gareth’s goblins still causing it pain.
Magda sneered as she stepped back. Her shield absorbed the impact from the pterosaur’s attack, but she still felt the need to get some space between herself and the monster. She glanced at the lone golden framed card floating before her, the results of her shield activating. It was an Angel of the Legion, a reasonable monster to summon but Magda suspected it wasn’t quite up to the task of taking on the pterosaur, not alone anyway.
Magda’s hands were a blur as she moved as fast as she could, flicking open her deck box with one whilst the other summoned the angel. The monster took shape before her, a humanoid form sporting a set of white feathery wings and carrying a flaming sword. Magda had no idea where the idea of angels had come from, there was certainly nothing like them in the heavens, the concept was an entirely mortal invention. It raised the interesting possibility that the monsters contained in a deck box need not actually exist.
The pterosaur squawked with rage as a monster appeared before it. It had seen this before, creatures emerging from nothing and whilst it didn’t understand how it was happening it could fathom that it was under threat. A part of the pterosaur’s primal brain told it to flee, to take off and escape as it had done before, but a second more powerful part was forcing it to stay. Its eggs were nearby and all the ancient’s instincts were forcing it to stand and fight.
Magda checked her hand of cards. She had some options, but her choice was obvious. She hadn’t drawn her smite spell, which was a shame. There was only one copy in her deck, but the card would have likely struck down the pterosaur instantly. Life wasn’t that easy and for now, her best choice was bringing out the single Angelic Herald she had drawn.
The angel announced its summoning with the blare of a horn. When it formed the Angelic Herald revealed the top two cards of the deck and then granted one monster Magda controlled one hundred attack and defence for each angel card revealed. The herald represented this power with the blowing of a golden trumpet, the instrument acting as the monster’s weapon when it was forced to attack.
A second Angel of the Legion and Magda’s third copy of Cherub Archer revealed themselves, power pouring from the cards into the herald. The newly summoned monster was the stronger of Magda’s pair and it made sense to build try and hit the highest attack possible.
She was about to open her mouth, to shout the order that was required for her angels to attack, when something streaked across the darkness.
It was a tentacle, a tendril that had burst forth from a swirling portal. Sarkuran had cast his Blood Rite spell, sacrificing a quickly summoned Angry Polyp to power the destructive magic. The tentacles struck the pterosaur, knocking it off the wall and sending it sliding across the street.
“Let’s teach that thing a lesson!” Magda said, shocking herself with how much rage she had spoken with. The pterosaur had hurt Gareth badly and a seething resentment had been building within her. She didn’t like the feeling, the vitriol boiling in her chest. She knew deep down that striking down the pterosaur wouldn’t make her feel better, but that didn’t stop Magda from relishing the prospect of violence.
The two angels moved in unison, the herald throwing itself at the ancient and pressing it to the ground with its trumpet. The beast tried to free itself, but it couldn’t the angel’s strength outclassing the pterosaurs. The Angel of Legion ended it swiftly, a single downward blow piercing through the pterosaur’s left eye and erupting out of the side of its cheek.
Chameleonic Glider defeated. 296 experience points gained.
The angels dissipated into golden light as Magda snapped her deck box shut. She pointed her sunstone towards the corpse of the pterosaur, the light dancing off its hide. The creature had seemed so vibrant as it was shifting colour but now its scales were dull, the life fading from them quickly. Magda was right, she didn’t feel better. A turn of her head towards the now motherless eggs made her feel infinitely worse.
“A shame,” Sarkuran said, stepping next to Magda. He looked down at the body solemnly. “It never feels good to kill a creature with children. I’ve had to do it more often than I would like.” A sigh escaped Sarkuran’s lips, a rare sign of regret from the emperor. “I know it will probably do little to help but consider that this beast was a threat to the goblins. By slaying this beast, we have likely saved untold numbers of lives.”
“It does help a little. I know things have to die. I don’t know why, but that’s how I set up the universe, apparently. It still doesn’t feel good, but I’ll cope. We’ve beaten enough monsters now that we’re bound to have to killed a parent before.” Magda took a deep breath and turned her head upwards, her eyes locking on the moon. It was beautiful, a glowing orb casting its gentle light down onto the rainforest. “You know, sometimes I do something right,” Magda said.
Sarkuran followed her eyes upwards to the moon. “You certainly do. We should hurry back to Gareth and Imelda. The quicker we can get out of here the better. We should collect all the eggs up.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” Magda turned away from the corpse of the pterosaur and toward the fallen mother’s unhatched children. She followed Sarkuran towards the nest and swung her bag around ready.
Lifting the eggs was difficult. Their shells were soft like a reptiles and they wobbled unsettlingly as Magda picked them up. One by one they were placed into her bag, the eggs vanishing into the void within. Food items that were placed into it lasted forever, never rotting or going off, so Magda assumed that everything inside was held in some kind of stasis but she had never used it on a living being before.
“There is a fair few booster crystals here. More than I expected,” Sarkuran said, scooping up the glowing blue fragments. “I’ve found six of them so far, though I can’t see any more glowing.”
“We don’t want to spend too long looking,” Magda said, slipping another egg into her pack. “Messing about with them is probably going to draw in elementals. We’ve already had one fight in the dark.”
“An astute assessment. These are solidified magic. I imagine that the ancient must have been so aggressive in part because its choice of nesting material must cause issues with the other denizens of these ruins.”
“Uh, yeah, something like that.” Magda picked up the last of the eggs. “That’s the last of them. We ready to head back? This whole thing has been a massive diversion. Is this what’s going to happen all the time? Just constant problems?”
Sarkuran gave a casual shrug. “What was it you expected? Life is messy enough as it is and you’re trying to achieve something that many would consider impossible. There’s going to be some trials on that path. This is just another one of those. Only by facing these troubles and overcoming them will you prove yourself worthy of your goal.”
“That’s very dramatic.”
“One could argue that the very notion of destroying the gods is inherently filled with drama.”
Magda thought about the statement for a moment. “That’s one way of putting it. Come on. Let’s get back before there’s any more drama.”
Chapter Fourteen
Henig watched the moon as it rose high above the treeline. It had been centuries since he had last paid attention to the great white orb drifting through the sky. It hadn’t seemed important, a boring part of existence that was secondary to his role as custodian of the tower. A lot of things had felt that way, insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Since his goddess had returned Henig had found his attention drifting to such things again, to not just the moon but the trees and flowers, the birds in the sky and the insects scurrying along the ground. It was like his long slow decline was over and that once again he found himself with renewed purpose.
It was the middle of the night and Henig was certain that Magda and the others had to have passed through the teleport platform by now. They would already be on the next step to saving not only Acamida but the rest of the universe as well. Provided of course they hadn’t run into any issues, but Henig couldn’t imagine anything that would be a problem. His mistress was, after all, a god.
The vantage point of his study let Henig look out over the canopy of the forest, a sea of endless green stretching in every direction. Even Henig had no idea how big the jungle was. Perhaps at one time, he might have but time had decreased his memories whilst no doubt increasing the jungle’s reach. Acamida was a big world with dozens of continents covering its surface. Entire empires could rise and fall unnoticed in its vastness. Magdalena had taught that there were countless worlds, but Henig knew that he could have spent his already long life exploring this one and never experience everything.
His bony head turned as he heard the familiar low rumble of the lift slide into place in the centre of the sanctum. The sound was so quiet that to most it would be inaudible, but the tower was part of Henig, his soul bound into the stones. It was that bond that had kept him alive. When others died, they went to the heavens to be reaped by the false gods. Henig would never suffer that fate, but he knew that his current existence was a mockery of life. He had let his body rot and wither, his memories fading without a physical brain to hold them, his sensations dulled. Henig would never feel the touch of another person or enjoy the smell of the rainforest after a fresh rain, but it had all been worth it. His goddess had returned to him, his long vigil was over. Now he had found a new reason for being. He would serve Magdalena, he always would, but with the growing population around the tower, he felt that his protection extended to those people. The tower was once the heart of a great city, it was nice to see life around it once more.
“Good evening, madam High Scribe,” Henig said without turning around.
“How did you know it was me?” Mariska said, stepping off the platform. She hitched up the hem of her long white robe and stepped towards the window. As she moved her stone feet clonked against the smooth surface of the tower’s floor.
“It’s the middle of the night. There aren’t many others at the tower who don’t need to sleep, and if you were one of the spiders there would have been considerably more noise when you arrived. They never seem to sit still.”
“No, they do not. I hope you don’t mind my intrusion.” Mariska didn’t find Henig repulsive. She knew she should, he was after all an organic, but from what she could determine the lich was bound to the tower in some way. That meant he wasn’t wholly an abomination if part of him was sacred stone and the most disgusting part of a fleshy being—the constantly shedding skin—had long since rotted away. “I simply wanted to look out at the jungle. To see how big my…” the Golden hesitated for a moment, “new home is. I thought perhaps I might be able to see my land from here, but it really is true, I am a world away.”
“That you are. You’re welcome up here any time. It might be my duty to hold vigil in this tower, but it belongs to everyone. To all the people of Acamida. It was from here that my goddess tried to help the people of this world, I don’t see any reason to do differently.”
“Very noble of you. It would seem that my goddess wants the same despite the presence of so many fleshy things.”
“You get used to them,” Henig said. If he could have smiled, he would have. From what he understood the fact that there were Golden living around the tower at all was a huge win. Their disdain for organic creatures was palpable. It helped that the crystal spiders were like them in a way, animated minerals. In terms of sheer numbers, the spiders had a good claim to being the most populous people of the growing town.
“I sincerely hope not.” Mariska shuddered, her stone shoulders rumbling as they moved in their sockets. “The thought that I could become used to the muck and the filth. That’s unthinkable.”
“I suggest you try. Your pharaoh wants your people to go out into the world more, to open your borders and help others. Non-organic life is the minority out there in Acamida at large. You’re going to experience forms of life you never thought imaginable and most of it is organic.”
Mariska put her hands on the wall and leant towards the clear crystal that acted as glass for Henig’s lookout. “Perhaps. My kind is no strangers to the outer world, or well, some of us aren’t We’ve had merchants plying trade from the outer outposts for a long time, but you’re right. This is different. I honestly thought I would never see my goddess make such a proclamation in this time.”
“And if I’m being honest there was always the chance mine might not return,” Henig said. He liked the Golden noble, there was something about her, the way she held herself. In her, he felt a kindred spirit, someone who was dedicated to their god with their entire being. Of course, Henig knew that the dragon who ruled the Golden was a mortal, but he could see why they would come to the conclusion she was divine. She had created the Golden from nothing and used the energy within the Godsword she was bound with to grant them souls. It was a mirror of what Magdalena had done for the entire universe, a tiny reflection of the great splendour of his goddess.
Considering the crimes of Magdalena’s children as far as Henig was concerned Neferure had more right to the title of god than they did.
“We are both slaves to our whims. Or well, perhaps not slaves. That’s a strong word and my dedication to my goddess is of my own will.”
